Asian American Art History Professor Christine Balance em: cbalance@uci.edu 1
What can Asian American art do? The symbolic assertion of presence through strategic acts of visual representation (ranging from critiques of dominant culture to alternative expressions of a polycentric public sphere) can provide a previously neglected people with a powerful claim to place in a society where their images are not the norm. (Machida, 6) 2
What does Asian American art work against? More broadly, how does the U.S. construct itself based upon how it differentiates itself from its Others? 3
Katherine Hepburn in Dragon Seed 4
Marlon Brando in Teahouse of August 5
Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany s 6
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Reading the (Asian) Body Comparing the Mongoloid or Negroid brains and bodies to those of Occidentals (or Western people), phrenologists, physiognomists, craniologists, and other body surveillance teams created scientific evidence based upon their reading of bodies as added proof to what most Americans already felt they knew from the popular commercial culture Siamese twins, zoos, circus/freak sideshows, dime museums; also, advertising, stage performance, Tin Pan Alley music sheets, records, and other silent and talking films regularly mimicked what Chinese and other Asians looked like, sounded like, acted like, and thought like. (17) 9
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As defined by Edward Said, Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on.... the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient.. despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (Said, 1-3,5) 11
Arnold Genthe, Street of Gamblers (circa 1898) 12
Arnold Genthe, Fish Dealer s Daughter (circa 1896) 13
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That a photograph can come to stand as evidence, for example, rests not on a natural or existential fact, but on a social, semiotic process evidential force is a complex historical outcome and is exercised by photographs only within certain institutional practices and within particular historical relations... (Tagg, 4-5) the coupling of evidence and photography in the second half of the nineteenth century was bound up with the emergence of new institutions and new practices of observation and record-keeping with the development of a network of disciplinary institutions the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals, departments of public health, schools and even the modern factory system itself. (Tagg, 4-5) 15
Burden of Representation Power and meaning thus have a reciprocal relation described in the coupled concepts of the regime of power and the regime of sense. What characterized the regime in which photographic evidence emerged, therefore, was a complex administrative and discursive restructuring, turning on a social division between the power and privilege of producing and possessing and the burden of being meaning. (Tagg, 6) 16
What do these photographs do? More specifically, how does the U.S. construct itself based upon how it differentiates itself from its Others? 17